Abstract
Written close to Julius Caesar, probably a little earlier in the year 1599, Henry V seems to some readers to express a similar cynicism about the supposedly heroic past. Shakespeare invented the less admirable traits of Brutus and Caesar, I have argued, to make them more interestingly complicated as dramatic characters (see pp. 31–40, 53) — could that have been his intention in Henry V as well? Or could Julius Caesar have been written in reaction to Henry who seems, on first acquaintance, too uncomplicated?
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Notes
J. Dover Wilson (ed), Coriolanus (New Shakespeare ed., 1960) p. xviii.
H. C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, II, 209. Compare A. C. Bradley, ‘Coriolanus’, in A Miscellany(1929)p. 75•
MacCallum, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays, pp. 581-z; compare John Palmer, Political and Comic Characters of Shakespeare (1962 ed.) p. 264; and Bullough, Sources, v, 515.
See p. 175, above; and O. J. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Satire (1943) PP. 2o4ff•; Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare, is, 225. I am indebted to Goddard for several points in my discussion of Menenius.
Some of the key-passages are cited by M. W. MacCallum (Shakespeare’s Roman Plays, p. 562) and by Harold C. Goddard (The Meaning of Shake-speare, II, zz6), who pointed out that the speaker’s character makes the fable of the belly ‘both hiehlv annronriate and fatally ironic on Menenin.c’ linv’-
I. 3. 46–7. Compare Maurice Charney, Shakespeare’s Roman Plays (Cambridge, Mass.. I96¢) D. 179.
See The Revenger’s Tragedy, IH. S. 157; also Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece (i6o8) sig. Bzb, where Tulla treades on her father’, and Marlowe’s Edward II (the king’s death). The victor who stands on his enemy is a commonplace of Renaissance art (e.g. Donatello’s David). Stamping on one’s enemy, however, was not only a theatrical convention. The dramatist George Wilkins was accused in 1612. of having ‘outragiously beaten one Judyth Walton & stamped upon her so that she was Caried home in a Chayre’ (Shakespeare Survey, xxv (1972) 147).
Chateaubriand, The Memoirs (Penguin ed., 1965) p. 324.
O. J. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Satire (1943) P. 199.
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© 2002 E.A.J. Honigmann
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Honigmann, E.A.J. (2002). Henry V: the Rabbit and the Duck. In: Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503038_11
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